Only 2 words can best describe this book: Typical Crichton.
We have now come to expect this from Crichton whenever he writes a book. Almost all of his books be it Andromeda Strain, Jurassic park, Lost World, Sphere, Timeline and his latest thriller ‘Prey’ have one thing in common – A one line story, but backed with some amazing research work which convinces you of all the stuff, and added with it some non stop over the edge action. Prey is no different from others. Essentially, it’s the same story – A bunch of idiots in a huge research company manage to screw up their most advanced technology by not paying enough attention to smaller details, and all hell breaks loose!
The Book
As I said above the story can be summed up in just one line I wrote above. However, the settings change for Crichton change. This time around Crichton introduces to the possible convergence of Distributed Systems, Software Agents, Nanotechnology, and Genetic Engineering. Don’t worry, each of those terms are explained to convincing details in the book, and even a non-techie reader can understand all the stuff at higher levels. That is actually the power of Crichton! He can investigate any technology and actually express it in simple terms understandable to his readers, and yet convince.
All said and done, here is some insight into the story – A hi-tech company Xymos corporation actually develops a method to combine genetic engineering and nanotechnology to produce nano-micro robots (The size of nanotechnology device can actually be 1000th of a single strand of hair- Imagine!) capable of thinking and working in environments using their distributed agents intelligence to capture a image. However as with Crichton’s books, something has to go wrong somewhere. Here, the swarm (thousands or millions of particles [nanotechnology micro robots]) get loose in the environment. What’s worse, due to the inherent learning capabilities of a software agent, they start adapting and learning!
What next? Well, that’s for you guys to find out. This is the point where Crichton puts up a base for the rest of the book and it takes him nearly half of the pages to do this. However its justified by the amount of actual research it took him to write it and explain to his reader. What happens to the swarm? What happens to the stuff in environment? What caused all of the mayhem? Well for all this, simply grab the book!
The Characters
Like most of Crichton’s books, most of the characters are never really well defined. That’s because, when an author starts writing for a movie instead of a book, the cinematic constraints over take the character development. However, its not a problem with Crichton, as he has enough up his sleeve to dis-regard his characters completely. Same applies to this book as well.
An avid reader can easily make out when an author writes a BOOK and when an author writes a SCREENPLAY. That is exactly the problem with Prey. While Crichton’s previous book ‘The Andromeda Strain’ which was on similar lines is actually a BOOK, Prey is more like a SCREENPLAY. And this is easily noticed, when proceedings in the book get more complex and thrilling.
Over all
Overall, its simply a un-put-down-able book. I finished the entire book in one sitting, and believe me, given Crichton’s characteristic; this one can hold you on till the last page. At the end of the book, I was left thinking about the possibilities about stuff mentioned in the book. At the end, I was feeling as if I had just completed a thrill movie, but at the same time received a dose of all the latest technologies. A few hours before I started writing this review I actually begin to think in terms of the plausibility of what Crichton writes. To my horror (a random search on google.com), the book doesn’t really go overboard in suggesting that distributed software agent intelligence combined with nanotechnology and genetic engineering (the research is real folks!) is really something which can either be good, or plain simply – catastrophic.
Come to think of it. Even my windows media player (version 9, for XP) seems to know what songs I listen to at night times and day times. It did come up with a favorites list. Though not accurate, I am pretty sure in a few months it will learn and adapt to actually give me a list which I might actually like! Is this the beginning of things to come?
Happy reading!